Detective Tyador Borlú of Besźel’s Extreme Crimes Squad is assigned to what at first appears to be a fairly straightforward case: the murder of a young woman whose body was discovered dumped in a park situated on the border between Besźel and Ul Qoma.
And right away the reader realizes that, no matter how straightforward this murder mystery might be, there’ll be nothing straight about the narrative, for Besźel and Ul Qoma aren’t merely countries that happen to border one another. They are city-states in a state of intimate balkanization. Read the rest of this entry »
